“When two elephants are fighting, the grass will suffer.” – The Refugee All Stars

 

When inequality succumbs evacuation, it becomes Exodus.

When demoralizing becomes dehumanization,

generalizations becomes genocide.

 

 

When the touch of Our lovers

become as unfamiliar as shadows

and Our front lawn

becomes the graveyard of peers,

infrastructure becomes inconsistent.

 

Street signs will start to resemble posters.

Prison cells, are now Our dorm rooms,

served as asentence

teaching Us that metaphor is real.

But we neverget the point

Until What’s said is said

When where Welay Our hearts to slumber

becomes the dwelling place of the unrest,

trading mailboxes for tombstones,

Our deeds become eulogies,

Our cries are only a foreign dialect.

 

 

We pray that God still exists.

Fearing our weeping does not fall on deaf ears,

but recollecting that Our kisses taste best

when tears are cascading off Our lips.

 

When Our wrists

have sewn themselves to the hem of Our mothers spine,

it becomes suicide to abandon Your seamstress.

We know We will not survive here alone.

 

 

When wishing We could stand hand and hand

has only left Us with severed palms

falling asleep in our forearms,

and Our oasis in a desert

has been ransacked

by the burn of the unfamiliar,

we are blinded by the mirage of democracy

 

We have become a closed caption narration

of broken Haitian limbs.

A melancholy juxtaposition of the forgotten.

The mordant truth in witnessing 

Weakness in numbers in Syria

 

The smell of rotting flesh reminds me of foster homes.

How they dangled nooses over Our pride

because

We have never been privileged enough

to know We might have deserved better

We end up merchandising what’s left of Our bodies

to people who label “priceless” as a blaspheme

falling like Rolling Stones;

an avalanche of the defeminized and emasculated

littered across the world you call home

where they travel over Our bodies

like speed bumps and pot holes.

Their guillotine shaped foot steps

neglect the fact that this

is where We rest Our heads now

 

 

When the innocent

are being slaughtered on CNN

The morning you wake up in your safety.

When the burning smiles of

Philippines,Syria, Sierra Leone, and Haiti

are cooked up and served to you

next to your eggs and bacon

We become the recipients of,

"oh my god,

that's terrible"

 at a coffee table of politics and free will

cluttered with news article that tell Our Story

but fail to speak Our suffering.

The same instant you swallow your empathy

Remember;

your Instagram posts will not raise Our dead

your Facebook likes wont bring Us home

We are already forgotten.